Remember
by unexpectedrevelations
Summary: Oneshot-- Manfred reminisces about Zelda.


_Do you remember me?_

_Well, do you? _

_I'll always be here: right on the edge of your tragic, messed-up world._

_Remember me and remember this: _

_I won't miss you._

Zelda Dobinski.

He remembers her still; she is fresh in his memory. It was almost as if she had never left.

His muse, his silent lover, his silver moon and crystal tears, his dark angel.

His best friend.

There was a time (_long long ago_) when he'd had himself totally convinced that she would be there forever. After she left, he spent the first week of school telling anyone who would listen (_Asa_) that she was a slut, a whore, that he was glad to see her go. Telling the endowed kids that she'd left for university was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do. Afterwards, Asa'd reminded him that she was the customary age for university, and chastised him about the "mathematical genius" excuse, which, he'd thought, had been perfectly plausible. He did his best to forget the long nights of sleepless horror, in which he gave in to the ever-present tears time and again.

He was stronger now, at least on the outside. Never again would he cry for someone who was never coming back, though he had plenty of others to cry for. Yet she was the one who stuck fast in his memory, whose thin frame and greeny-gold eyes crept stealthily into his mind time and time again. He often thought- no, he knew- that if (_if only if_) she had stayed with him, she would have been his salvation. Evil had been her second nature, but part of him had always known that love was her first.

Love- she'd once been so full of it, fuller than you could imagine a person to be. He remembers the shy, trusting girl of their first meeting and how, so impetuously, she had taken his hand and held it, connecting them like some sort of frantic, frazzled electrical wire. How her smile had dipped straight into his soul, and, when she looked into his eyes, he had known that she saw him simply, stripped of all of the emotional fixtures, when in reality, he was everything but simple, even at ten years old.

He remembers their first day at the academy and the many days thereafter. The two of them, along with Asa, were inseparable, but he knew that his bond with Zelda was different somehow. He remembers watching her head bent over her desk, a swoop of black hair covering her face, a small frown line between her brows and her lower lip pouted in concentration, as they played at homework in the King's room. How, in the dark behind the stage before countless drama productions, she'd squeeze his hand and whisper that they would do amazingly, and he'd gaze in a sort of trance at her lipsticked mouth and fantasize about kissing and more. He remembers the terrible fascination for her that he'd harbored for so many years, until, one day, she finally pressed him up against a wall and kissed him. When she pulled away, breathless and gasping, he saw the high spots of color on her cheeks and pulled her to him to kiss her again. Her kisses were biting, like knives; they got to him when almost nothing else could. Yet they were wonderful too, like golden sunlight and purple panels of velvet.

He thinks often of how he had thought (_and still does_) that she was the most beautiful girl in the world, with her pretty black hair making a contrast with her purple cape. How, after she giggled when Asa called her Rapunzel, she would see his jealous glare and tiptoe lithely up to him before almost shyly laying her head on his shoulder. He remembers the long midnight walks they'd take in the ruin, wandering and talking aimlessly for hours on end. He held her close as she cried after she'd told him about her father, and he vowed that he would never let him hurt her again. That was when Zelda began to live at the academy year-round; he'd feared so much that she would be hurt if he let her go home. Little did he know that he was only locking her away into a far more unfathomable prison. That was also when they began to go a bit crazy, he reflected. Their love was the only thing they had in a world so full of lies and deception. He remembered confiding to her about his secret desire to escape his family and their wickedness, and how she promised that she'd follow him, wherever he chose to go. And he had believed her.

He remembers with an odd mixture of pride and guilt how they would persecute the younger children during their last two years at Bloor's. He misses those chases they'd make, he and Zelda and Asa, but mostly just he and Zelda. It gave him an odd high to be cruel, to frighten and ruin, and he knew that she felt the same euphoria. He had always sensed, though, that she felt the shame much deeper than he ever did.

He remembers that first night, the first of many more to come, the night that his mother left for good. She held him as he cried his frenetic, frenzied tears, and kissed him with a kind of fire he hadn't known she possessed. He remembers drinking in the sight of her pale nakedness for the first time, and how she blushed and tilted her head forward to hide her embarrassment with her raven hair. She was an ardent lover, forever divine and perfect in his eyes. He recollects fondly how she would stretch like a cat in the watery early morning sunlight, spoon closer to him, and kiss him so fiercely that he couldn't have resisted even if he'd wanted to. Most of all, he remembers her telling him that she loved him because he was the only one who had ever loved her back. He couldn't help thinking that it was the other way around.

He remembers with an almost tangible pain the time when things began to change. She looked at him with fear, almost, when he persecuted another child, and he regrets that it was Asa and not him whom she began to confide in. She had tried so hard to tell him that she didn't want a part of the Bloor legacy of iniquity, not now and not ever, but he didn't listen. Still, she loved him all the same, and he delusioned himself into thinking that nothing had changed at all. He remembers their last night together so clearly, how she had made love to him as if they had all the time in the world instead of only one night. Of how, the very next day, she had given him one last kiss and left Bloor's for good, her laughter glittering over the cobbles as she escaped, swathing him in a never-ending misery.

"I won't miss you," were her final words to him. He'd tried to tell her the same, to laugh with mocking contempt, but the words stuck in his throat and wouldn't materialize. He became the ghost he was today as a result; if he had been cruel before, he was now much, much worse. He began to truly hate Charlie Bone, having convinced himself that it was Charlie who had somehow made her leave.

He knows now, and perhaps has always known, that it was his fault, his and his alone. He knows now that he didn't deserve her and never had.

Some part of him latches onto the idea that, someday, she is coming back.

Another part of him knows that she never will.

But all of him, all of his deep, tortured being, never goes a day without wondering where she is now, what she is doing.

He wonders often if she ever thinks of him.

He still remembers, even when it causes him pain. He will always remember her- his fire, his sorrow, his Zelda.

But she is his no more.


End file.
